Since blogging about a toy flower I bought my wife I got multiple emails from guys who said they bought them for their wives. And one member went so far as paying Mahalo answers $10 to find the exact flower in the video. Think of how irrelevant a toy flower is for the audience on this site, and yet that casual mentioned likely caused over $100 of commerce to happen. What more if the offer was relevant to this site's audience?

If people want media free then I think it makes a lot of sense for publishers to use affiliate links to get a cut of the action. I reviewed SEM Rush before they had an affiliate program, and that likely added thousands of dollars in business for them. They have since added an affiliate program, and I have since went back to that old post and added affiliate links. Their affiliate payout is 40%, but I still have not earned that much because their price point is too low for what their tool does. They could increase their price 400% and it would still be a good value.

A lot of high payout affiliate marketing is sleazy (diet scams, hyped network marketing, reverse billing fraud, cookie pushing, etc.) but if you have a real site with decent reach you can profit significantly from giving people discounts and recommending high value offers that you are proud to endorse. I shared some affiliate program integration tips in the forums, highlighting a couple of our blog posts that made 4 figures and 5 figures each.

Comments

I have had a interest in travel since a little tacker. I now see myself blogging and sharing my thoughts yes I do make a little revenue on the side by affiliate partnerships.

My real wins have come from being able support businesses campaigns, and showing that bloggers can influence traffic.

To be honest I did get a buzz about helping a business recently drive over $15K worth of sales in less then 7 days. The commission check will be tiny, but there wasn't a Viagra pill, ever lasting diet, I'll be the richest man in Babylon scheme in sight. It was done with hard work and SEO efforts and good partnership.

I created a review of Soundview, a site selling business audio books and it is still generating affiliate sales over 1 year later. I wrote a non biased review of their website and pointed out both good and bad UI features. The post was not intended to sell products, it was a note of my personal experience as a customer.

People will respect and trust your writing if you are honest and genuine.

I don't think it's particularly fair that you've no-followed the link to Mahalo Answers. Mahalo has only treated you with dignity and respect. You have a number of links on this Mahalo page, and they're all dofollow: http://www.mahalo.com/Seo

So as a sign of what I would suppose is some sort of perverted gratitude, you've decided to put nofollow tags around the link to Mahalo Answers. What could Mahalo possibly have done to deserve this?